To find out more about Jennie Savage go to www.jenniesavage.co.uk
 
 
This project seeks to create a museum like experience on the street. The experience is framed by the young people who take part in the project and how they have represented their place through audio. The audio seeks to express aspects of their place at this moment in time (for them) using techniques such as interviewing, documentary, fiction, narrative, personal diary texts, voice over and field recordings. These six sets of recordings will play on a loop, and the viewer will walk through the transmissions. Each person will hear a unique combination of sounds. The street is an ever changing character in the museum and the viewer an unknown.
 
The street, the audio combination and the viewer are three sets of variables. The project is heard in the moment. That experience is a representation. The Museum of the Moment is the thing as opposed to a representation of the thing.
  
The role of museum institutions is to hold in store collections, archives and information for the public and to make those collections available to the public through exhibitions. In many ways, therefore, museums are guardians of our culture, our history and our collective understanding of who we are as a society.
 
Museums also represent is the colonial impulse to map, collect and order the world. To create micro versions of the world in which we, the viewer, presides god–like, reigning over time and place. This god–like reign speaks in the voice of a scientific paradigm, representing a class, a history and a gender. It frames a collective meta- narrative born out of C18th explorers, imperialism and colonisation.
 
Objects in museum collections play two parts, firstly they exist as ‘things’ to be regarded for their materiality or their aesthetic value and secondly they exist as signifiers for stories and cultures, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle of how the world and history fit together. These stories are however told by the voice of science, of reason and history. The truths that the museum tells us are, therefore, the truths of a paradigm, according to a particular westernised world view.
 
The Museum of the Moment does not seek to offer a critique of museums. Instead it will deconstruct the museum and seek to re-negotiate, re-explore and construct new parameters imagining how a museum could be more reflexive and exist in the moment. This process will seek to transcribe the museum experience onto the street but also allow the transient, the momentary, the everyday, the unrecorded to appear in the museum.
 
Central themes common in museum experience are; walking or travelling, navigating space in relation to taxonomies. The mapping of temporal and geographical systems onto space. The organisation and signification of objects in relations to stories. Museum architecture as a legacy from the birth of capitalism. The importance of the gaze.
 
The Museum Of The Moment replaces museum architecture with the street and wireless headphones. This situation shifts the dynamic in the relationship between the viewer and the ‘subject’. The subject is no longer static, dead, it is ever changing, temporal, alive, impossible to predict or pin down. The headphones mark the viewer out as ‘tourist’, ‘voyeur’ and just as they regard the street and listen in on its culture, the street will be watching them.
 
The gaze and the way in which the viewer looks at the place will be the same gaze we use to regard a collection at the museum. However at the Museum of the Moment the viewer is looking at real life, a constant rolling, changing and unpredictable scene. The audio voice over creates a framework for the viewer to experience the street. The museum is never narrating a definitive scene. The identity politic of the viewer is as variable as the narration by the young people and the events happening on the street. These three factors are shifting and changing creating a unique experience in the moment for each viewer.
 
During the making of The Museum Of The Moment the young people were invited to take part in a series of workshops and events which encouraged them to explore their relationship to place, their local knowledge of place and their biography through place. The process invited them to explore their world and show it to other people. These processes make visible this ‘meta tagging’ inviting the young people to tie memories, associations, feelings and ideas to specific places. In exploring sites in this way the young people show us their city, they also, self – consciously, represent themselves. However, like the city the young people are in an acute moment of change themselves and the thoughts experiences and ideas they articulate are an expression of that personal shift from childhood to adulthood. The way they see their place now is quickly over written with, not just new experiences, but new perspectives on the world.
 
Unlike the museum institution it is the young people who led on the construction of the content, who decided what goes in the museum and how they would like to show themselves and their place to the outside world. The workshops put in place a framework which encouraged them to take the lead on what goes in the museum. They could have decided that it should all be based on fictional characters. In the end their museum is documentary based and consists of interviews.  What is subverted, however, is the way in which the material is collected and mediated. The Museum of the Moment is about mediating the voices of the young people creating situations which enable them to express themselves and a space for people to hear their voices.
 
 
© Jennie Savage Feb 2007